Among the various explanations for the run-up in oil prices that occurred through mid-2008, one story focuses on the role of monetary policy in the United States and in developing economies. In this view, developing countries that peg their currencies to the dollar were forced to ease their...

We examine the effects of endogenously determined oil price fluctuations in a two-country DSGE model. Under incomplete financial markets, an oil market-specific shock that boosts the oil price results in a wealth transfer toward oil exporters, depresses the oil importer's consumption, and causes...

In a two-country DSGE model, the effects of foreign demand shocks on the home country are greatly amplified if the home economy is constrained by the zero lower bound for policy interest rates. This result applies even to countries that are relatively closed to trade such as the United States....

We develop and estimate an open economy New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) in which variable demand elasticities give rise to movements in desired markups in response to changes in competitive pressure from abroad. A parametric restriction yields the standard NKPC under constant elasticity and...

Beginning in 2009, in many advanced economies, policy rates reached their zero lower bound (ZLB). Almost at the same time, oil prices started rising again. We analyze how the ZLB affects the propagation of oil shocks. As these shocks move inflation and output in opposite directions, their...

A model with collateral constraints displays asymmetric responses to house price changes. When housing wealth is high, collateral constraints become slack, and the response of consumption and hours to shocks that move house prices is positive yet small. When housing wealth is low, collateral...

This paper studies the international propagation of sovereign debt default. We posit a two-country economy where capital constrained banks grant loans to firms and invest in bonds issued by the domestic and the foreign government. The model economy is calibrated to data from Europe, with the two...

A key application of automatic differentiation (AD) is to facilitate numerical optimization problems. Such problems are at the core of many estimation techniques, including maximum likelihood. As one of the first applications of AD in the field of economics, we used Tapenade to construct...

Gali's innovative approach of imposing long-run restrictions on a vector autoregression (VAR) to identify the effects of a technology shock has become widely utilized. In this paper, we investigate its reliability through Monte Carlo simulations of several relatively standard business cycle...

In a stylized DSGE model with an energy sector, the optimal policy response to an adverse energy supply shock implies a rise in core inflation, a larger rise in headline inflation, and a decline in wage inflation. The optimal policy is well-approximated by policies that stabilize the output gap,...